The Achievements of the Negro Colleges
IT IS not my purpose to attempt a wholesale refutation of the excellent article “Higher Education for the Negro,” which Professor Bernard W. Harleston wrote for the November Atlantic. I do wish, however, to approach the subject from a slightly different point of view. I was born and reared in the South and had my early schooling there before going north for my degrees. I have elected to live in the South and have served as president of Morehouse College for twenty-five years, despite many opportunities to leave the college. From this background, it could be that I have a keener appreciation of the predominantly Negro colleges, what they have meant to the nation, and what they may yet become than the distinguished scholar at Tufts. These colleges are essential today, segregated as many of them are, and they will be needed in the nonsegregated tomorrow.
Several criteria should be taken into consideration before we approach a final verdict on Professor Harleston’s assertion that certain predominantly Negro colleges should be “either closed or radically changed.” We should examine the present need for the college, the quality of work it is doing, and to what extent the college can get support to improve its program. Such questions could be raised about many colleges, not only the 123 which are predominantly Negro.
Educators who are supposed to know keep saying that in less than ten years college enrollment will double and the end of the increase is not in sight. One editor predicted that within a few years an average of one college a week must be built in order to meet the demands for a college education, and that all existing institutions will have to expand their facilities. Why then tear down only to rebuild? The various federal aid programs now available, and others that will be forthcoming, may go a long way to assist all developing institutions, Negro and white, to make significant contributions to American education. As the federal government moves in, it does not necessarily follow that foundations and corporations will withdraw their support from colleges and universities. By means of their combined forces, federal aid and philanthropy may do what was impossible a few years ago. No one is wise enough to speak dogmatically for the future, not even ten years hence.
It cannot be denied that almost the whole of the first century of Negro higher education, from 1865 to the present, was tightly segregated. All predominantly Negro institutions existed, developed, and had their being in the unhealthy climate of segregation, a condition they did not create. As wonderful as the Christian motivation was that gave birth to many of these colleges, they were mission schools and for the most part received meager support.
The Supreme Court decision of May 17, 1954, broke the back of segregation. Idealists taking the will for the deed wondered if there was any longer a need for the Negro colleges: colleges that had been good enough for Negroes in the segregated first century were deemed not good enough to survive in a desegregated society. I hope that this fallacy has now been exploded thanks to Earl J. McGrath and the Carnegie Foundation for his book The Predominantly Negro Colleges and Universities in Transition. McGrath argues that not only are these colleges needed but they have a greater contribution to make to American life in the years ahead. McGrath points out that Negro colleges have their counterparts among the white colleges in that they range all the way from being very marginal in academic performance to very good. But the Negro colleges are not the only institutions struggling against mediocrity. There are today 400 predominantly white colleges which are not good enough to be accredited by the six regional rating agencies. But the report I hear is that “they should be strengthened,” not plowed under.
IF THE predominantly Negro colleges were so weak in many respects, how could they have done so much with so little in a segregated century? My guess is that more than 85 percent of all living Negro college graduates in the United States took their undergraduate training in predominantly Negro colleges. We know that many leading Americans of the past, such as Booker T. Washington, Robert Russa Moton, W. E. B. DuBois, James Werdon Johnson, Mary McLeod Bethune, and a host of others, attended predominantly Negro colleges.
To appeal to the past is one thing, but these colleges should be judged by their living graduates.
I requested the colleges of the United Negro College Fund to tell me how many of their graduates arc teaching in predominantly white institutions. (Naturally our graduates are teaching in all of the predominantly Negro colleges.) Twentytwo UNCF colleges responded to my inquiry, naming eighty predominantly white institutions where their graduates are employed in all ranks, from instructors to full professors and chairmen of departments. Among the eighty are Washington University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Illinois College of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, New York University, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, Indiana University, Syracuse University, Brooklyn College, Haverford College, Ohio Wesleyan, University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin, University of Michigan, Rutgers University, Northwestern, and Cornell. Had all UNCF colleges responded, I am sure the number would have been larger, but the point I am making is that to reach these posts, the graduates of the Negro colleges went on and did their M.A. and Ph.D. work in the best universities of America.
Graduates of predominantly Negro colleges are today serving as municipal, state, and federal judges. They are in the United States Congress and in state legislatures. The bishop of the Methodist Church for the New Jersey area is Prince A. Taylor, Jr., who is also the president of the Council of Bishops of the Methodist Church. A top historian at the University of Chicago is John Hope Franklin. The chairman of the department of sociology at Haverford, Ira Reid, is a graduate of a predominantly Negro college. So are Patricia Harris, our ambassador to Luxembourg, and Franklin Williams, ambassador to Ghana; Hugh Smythe, U.S. ambassador to Syria, is a graduate of a Negro college; the third Negro to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Martin Luther King, Jr., is an alumnus of a Negro institution. The honor role of our colleges includes among others the Solicitor General of the United States, Thurgood Marshall; George Weaver, Assistant Secretary of Labor; Mattiwilda Dobbs and Anabella Bernard, opera singers; authors Frank Yerby and Ralph Ellison; the two Negro senators in Georgia, LeRoy Johnson and Horace Ward, first since Reconstruction; Justices Dudley and Stephens, New York State Supreme Court; James M. Nabrit, president of Howard University, on leave, appointed by President Johnson to serve as U.S. representative to the United Nations Security Council with the rank of ambassador; Samuel Proctor, appointed by the President as Eastern Regional Director of the Anti-Poverty Program; and Howard Thurman, generally regarded as one of the twelve greatest preachers in the nation.
Every major university in the United States has enrolled graduates of predominantly Negro colleges, and many of them are doing exceptionally well. Many of them earned a Ph.D. degree or an M.D. in the normal time allotted for the completion of the degree; others have had to take some undergraduate course. I know one institution located in the Deep South which has its graduates pursuing graduate and professional degrees in forty-five different universities, mainly in the East and West and in a few Southern universities. I know another predominantly Negro college located in the Deep South that has produced one Ph.D. out of every eighteen Negroes who have earned that degree; and one out of every twenty-eight of its graduates has earned a doctorate.
Let us never forget that the leadership from the predominantly Negro colleges gave rise to the modern civil rights movement. It is fair to say that without Negro lawyers schooled in predominantly Negro colleges there would have been no May 17, 1954, decision of the U.S. Supreme Court and no civil rights legislation. The legal base for the 1954 decision was laid at Howard University, and the demonstration movements started in Montgomery, Alabama, and in Negro colleges of the Deep South.
IN THE seat where I sit, I have seen scores of boys enter Morehouse as freshmen who would under no condition have been accepted at certain prestige colleges or universities. I have seen these same boys develop, graduate from Morehouse, be accepted at the best graduate or professional schools, and graduate. I shall never forget a rather unpromising student who entered Morehouse apparently destined to fail; yet he graduated, entered a distinguished Eastern university, and earned his Ph.D. degree. I recall another young man who would never have been admitted to an Ivy League college. Yet he graduated from Morehouse and earned in three years (including summers) a Ph.D. degree at the University of California at Berkeley.
For a quarter of a century Morehouse and Spelman colleges have been conducting special programs in mathematics and reading for certain entering freshmen. Hampton institute began a summer program for freshmen in 1952. As far as I know, the first subsidized pre-college program for freshmen began in 1959 after the four Atlanta colleges (Morehouse, Spelman, Clark, and Morris Brown) and Dillard University received grants from the Taconic Foundation in 1958 to conduct summer programs to upgrade marginal freshmen who had been accepted to enter these colleges in September, 1959. In short, if Negroes do this well in a segregated society, in meagerly supported institutions, what will their performance be in the second century when segregation by law has virtually gone and discrimination is being gradually erased?
Although a staunch foe of segregation from birth, I am not willing to consider the enrollment of white students the major criterion of the quality of work in a predominantly Negro college. Speaking of Negro institutions. Professor Harleston says:
Many should be vigorously assisted in their efforts to attract able students of all races. Howard University in Washington, D.C., a distinguished university which is rapidly becoming truly integrated, is perhaps the most outstanding example of this kind of development. Other former Negro institutions, such as Bluefield State College and West Virginia State, have already been transformed into interracial colleges. Schools like Hampton Institute and Lincoln University are actively seeking out non-Negro students. Certain other institutions should be either closed or radically changed. In supporting them, state and local officials effectively cut the Negro student off from access to the more mature and sophisticated white institutions.
This theory would seem to say that mediocre Negro colleges would improve if they suddenly became highly desegregated with white students. Let us agree that integration is our objective and that it will take time. In reality, it is to be expected that Negro colleges in border states, such as Missouri, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and in the District of Columbia will desegregate heavily before Negro colleges in the Deep South — Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and other Southern states.
Even in the Deep South, Negro colleges are now enrolling white students, and they will come in ever increasing numbers. When Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes matriculated in the University of Georgia, the press said the university was integrated, even though they were but 2 among 7000 students. In 1954 when the United States Supreme Court outlawed segregation in the public schools, there were only 2 white students in 26 United Negro College Fund institutions. Today, there are 205 in 17 Negro colleges. This figure does not include the considerable number of exchange students on Negro campuses every year.
I am convinced that Negro colleges will continue to take freshmen who would not qualify for Ivy League colleges but who at the end of four years will enter the best universities and professional schools and do well. They have done this for many decades. These colleges have now and will continue to have the most integrated faculties in the nation. I believe that on the campuses of these colleges scholars of all faiths, cultures, and races will work together without a quota system. I believe that when the local climate is ready, students of other races will not hesitate to enroll wherever they can get a good education. This is just the beginning in the Deep South. The desegregation of the public schools will speed up desegregation in colleges, and in the future I believe that no social stigma will be attached to anyone because he has a degree from a historically Negro college.